Quote from:
The Pope in Winter: The Dark Face of John Paul II's Papacy, by John Cornwell, is published on Thursday by Viking-Penguin
Sunday Times article, 7 November:
Prudish pontiff
The papal biographer John Cornwell reports
Wives are to blame for violent husbands. Condoms don't work, and Aids is 'a pathology of the spirit'. Has the Pope's view of sex and gender brought the church to its knees?
Snip:
Before his decline into the late stages of Parkinson's disease, Karol Wojtyla — Pope John Paul II — was noted for his sunny, alpha-male persona, his athletic physique, his cinematic good looks and his ease with women. One of his first decisions when he became pope was to build a sauna, a personal gymnasium and an Olympic-size swimming pool at his summer palace. He was the first pope to take skiing holidays. Here was a pontiff who seemed comfortable with his body.
During an audience with the Pope in 1993, I saw him hugging, very gently, with striking intimacy, a diminutive nun. When he was involved in the theatre in his youth, and as a young priest, he loved the company of women, and there were even rumours of a love relationship in his student days. He used to say: "I am in love with love!" Yet John Paul's attitude towards women, sexuality and the body has been anything but easy and uncomplicated. He has proved himself the most puritanical pope in the modern period, with an obsessive horror of any form of sexuality that transgresses the narrow bounds of what he terms the "norms of sexology". His attitude towards women is medieval in its patriarchalism. Earlier this year he published an attack on feminism as if the women's movement had barely progressed since the bra-burning days of the 1960s.
In 1994, John Paul startlingly revealed, and not for the first time, a misogynistic side to his character when he met Dr Nafis Sadik, the Pakistani head of the UN Fund for Population Activities. The pontiff had invited her to the Vatican to talk about family planning. Dr Sadik, then in her early forties and dressed in a sari, attempted to make their meeting a discussion rather than a one-sided papal lecture.
"In many societies, and not just in the developing world, women don't have equal status with men," she told the Pope. "There's a lot of sexual violence within the family." Suddenly, as Sadik recalled, "John Paul burst out angrily, ÔDon't you think that the irresponsible behaviour of men is caused by women?'" This was long before his Parkinson's disease could explain such intemperance. In fact, Sadik thought he appeared "taut as a spring". She has said: "I found myself thinking: why is he so hard-hearted, so dogmatic, so lacking in kindness?"
End snip
More:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-1334302_1,00.html
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